SOURCE: Loney, G. M. “Edith Wharton and The House of Mirth: The Novelist Writes for the Theater.” Modern Drama 4 (September 1961): 152-63.

In the following essay, Loney examines Wharton's dramatization for the stage of The House of Mirth and posits reasons for the play's failure with audiences.

Although periodic grumblings from some critics, such as Yvor Winters, have intimated that writing for the theater is perilously close to literary prostitution, a number of American authors have not been able to resist the lure of seeing their fiction transformed into flesh and blood on the stage. Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Henry James, and William Dean Howells were all impelled either to dramatize their own novels or to write original works for the theater. Unfortunately for both the authors and the theater, disappointment has frequently been the reward of such efforts.